Taylor Swift Joins Big Red Machine to Prove She's an Indie "Renegade"

The track is the latest of team-up from Swift, Justin Vernon and Aaron Dessner

BY Brock ThiessenPublished Jul 2, 2021

It's not even been a full week since Bon Iver's Justin Vernon and the National's Aaron Dessner announced their latest album as Big Red Machine, but already we now have three tracks off How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last? The latest is one of the record's two Taylor Swift collabs: "Renegade."

The song has arrived via a video directed by Michael Brown, and in a statement, Dessner had the following to say of his latest T. Swift team-up:

While we were making folklore and evermore last year, Taylor and I sometimes talked about experimenting and writing songs together some day for Big Red Machine. Making music with your friends just to make it — that's how Big Red Machine started and has grown — and that's how Renegade came about too. This song was something we wrote after we finished evermore and it dawned on us that this was a BRM song. Taylor's words hit me so hard when I heard her first voice memo and still do, every time. Justin lifted the song further into the heavens, and my brother [Bryce Dessner]'s strings and drummer Jason Treuting add so much. The feeling and sound of this song feel very much at the heart of How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last? I'm so grateful to Taylor for continuing to share her incredible talent with me and that we are still finding excuses to make music together.

Watch the "Renegade" video below.

The song comes in the wake of "Latter Days" and "The Ghost of Cincinnati," while all of How Long Do You Think It's Gonna Last? arrives on August 27 via 37d03d.

Beyond Swift, the record features the likes of Anaïs Mitchell, Fleet Foxes' Robin Pecknold, Sharon Van Etten, La Force, My Brightest Diamond and Naeem.

Vernon and Dessner made their debut as Big Red Machine with a self-titled album in 2018.

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